March 8, 2026
Bernard LaFayette, Civil Rights Strategist Who Helped Pave Way For The Voting Rights Act, Dies At 85
"He was one of the great teachers of nonviolence in our time," Martin Luther King III said of LaFayette.
Bernard LaFayette, a key strategist in the Civil Rights Movement who laid the groundwork for the historic Selma voting rights campaign that helped lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has died at age 85.
LaFayette died March 5 of a heart attack, according to his son, Bernard LaFayette III. His decades-long career in activism, education, and nonviolence training left a lasting impact on America’s Civil Rights Movement.
With news of LaFayette’s death, Martin Luther King III, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s son, wrote on X: “I am saddened to learn of the passing of a dear friend and one of my father’s trusted colleagues, Bernard Lafayette Jr…He was one of the great teachers of nonviolence in our time, dedicating his life to bringing the practice of nonviolence to people at home and abroad. He helped train new generations in the philosophy of nonviolence alongside my mother at the King Center and through his work with communities and leaders across the world.”
Although the images from “Bloody Sunday” in March 1965 when state troopers violently attacked peaceful voting rights marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama shocked the nation and pushed Congress to act, LaFayette’s behind-the-scenes organizing work in Selma started years earlier.
In 1963, he was appointed director of the Alabama voter registration campaign for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). While many activists believed Selma was too dangerous to organize in, LaFayette insisted the march move forward anyway.
He and his former wife, Colia Liddell, helped Slema residents build a movement there through community organizing, training, reports The Guardian. There was constant danger.
On the same night civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi in 1963, LaFayette survived an assassination attempt outside his Selma home. As he arrived home from a voter-registration meeting, he was ambushed and beaten by two men who had faked car trouble to lure him. Luckily, a neighbor arrived with a rifle to defend him. Still, LaFayette urged calm and asked is neighbor to not shoot his attackers, PBS reports.
Born in Tampa, Florida, he traced his mission to fight injustice to an incident from childhood. At age seven, he watched his grandmother fall while trying to board a segregated trolley after paying her fare at the front. The moment that stayed with him for life. “I felt like a sword cut me in half, and I vowed I would do something about this problem one day,” he wrote in his memoir, according to PBS.
He later attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College) in Nashville, where he roomed with future congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis. Together they led the student-led nonviolent protests that resulted in Nashville becoming the first major Southern city to desegregate its downtown lunch counters.
LaFayette also joined the Freedom Rides of 1961, a series of nonviolent, interracial bus trips through the American South organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to challenge segregated interstate travel. During the campaign he was beaten in Montgomery, Alabama, and later arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, eventually serving time in the notorious Parchman prison along with hundreds of other activists.
After the successes of the Selma campaign and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, LaFayette continued organizing in Chicago and later worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. as national coordinator of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968.
LaFayette later expanded his work internationally, teaching principles of nonviolence in places including South Africa, Nigeria, and Latin America.
LaFayette is survived by his wife, Kate Bulls Lafayette, and his children, including Bernard Lafayette III and James Lafayette Sr.
RELATED CONTENT: Civil Rights ‘Foot Soldier’ Joanne Bland Died